1/14/2011 @ 3:59PM638 views

A Look at the Social Media Strategy Behind Murdoch's Tablet Newspaper

Ahead of the launch of Rupert Murdoch’s much-anticipated (and now delayed) iPad newspaper, many of us at Mashable have wondered exactly how the app-based publication will approach and utilize social media.

A source familiar with The Daily‘s social media plans has shared a few key items about its strategy, which is being headed up by Abigail Jones, a young woman with an impressive resume (dual masters degrees from Columbia Journalism School and the University of Edinburgh, bestselling co-author of the nonfictional Restless Virgins: Love, Sex and Survival in a New England Prep School), but little, we understand, experience with social media tools and strategy specifically.

Jones will concentrate much of her energy on The Daily‘s one blog, which will be hosted at blog.thedaily.com and powered by Tumblr. Like the Tumblrs of several established news media organizations, Jones will deconstruct stories covered by the publication, conducting interviews with staff about the reporting process on a particular story to entice the platform’s users to subscribe to The Daily in the App Store for a rumored $0.99 per week, or $4.25 per month.

Jones, we’re told, will also leverage Facebook, Twitter, Vimeo and YouTube to promote the day’s content — the cover, links to top stories and behind-the-scenes coverage, etc. — and to engage in conversations with readers and prospective readers alongside staff, who will particularly focus on Twitter to engage with audiences. From what we understand, content from the app will be shareable across social media channels, although our source was unable to go into further detail about exactly how that will work. We suspect that — as seen with Food & Wine magazine — users will be able to link to a web version of the article (perhaps trapped behind a paywall) from the app.

All of that sounds fine and well, but it’s not yet clear how Jones or the rest of The Daily‘s staff will keep pace with the real-time, 24/7 news cycle of the real-time social web, given that the publication does not plan to add content or push updates to the edition it releases to the App Store every morning. We’re also curious if The Daily will allow comments in the app and/or on its site, what the site’s paywall structure will be like and how it plans to cultivate its initially small community of core readers.

The Daily‘s early days will present a unique set of challenges for Jones, at any rate.

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